But EMC Global Marketing CTO Chuck Hollis says the company is looking to make sure it works with various cloud platforms moving forward. He notes that VMware has been the "first and best" cloud stack, but that the market demands choices. EMC has worked closely with Microsoft to integrate compatibility of EMC products in the company's Azure cloud and Hyper-V hypervisor, he notes. But EMC wants to make sure it's in on the open source movement codified by OpenStack too. "Much like Linux has matured into a serious enterprise operating environment, OpenStack is visibly on much the same trajectory," he says. "And the OpenStack Foundation is the key industry nexus point for the evolution of a growing number of different-flavored distributions and editions."

During the early days of Linux, EMC work on technical integrations, contributions to community projects and ensuring that various distributions of the code were qualified to work on EMC products through APIs. Hollis says he expects a similar path will be taken with EMC's work in OpenStack. The first feature he expects EMC to work on is Cinder, the block storage service OpenStack announced as an early-stage project during its last Folsom release.

Hollis says in informal discussions with customers and partners, interest in OpenStack has picked up in the past six months. "It's gone from a small handful of devotees to a much larger crowd of enterprise IT shops and IT service providers who now have the technology on their roadmap in one form or another," he writes.

EMC will be rubbing elbows in OpenStack with some familiar company, including other industry stalwarts like Cisco, HP, Dell, IBM and Red Hat.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.

This story, "EMC joins OpenStack, likens it to Linux development" was originally published by
Network World.

Senior Writer Brandon Butler covers the cloud computing industry for Network World by focusing on the advancements of major players in the industry, tracking end user deployments and keeping tabs on the hottest new startups. He contributes to NetworkWorld.com and is the author of the Cloud Chronicles blog. Email him at bbutler@nww.com and follow him on Twitter @BButlerNWW.